Sleepy Comcast Denouement

By consumerist.comJune 27, 2006

Once again, the guy who took a video of the Comcast technician asleep on his couch, is dissatisfied. Oh, his internet works fine and everything. No outages, no malfunctioning routers, no snakes crawling out of his cable box.

Brian’s unhappy because Comcast fired the technician and won’t rehire him. Brian has called at least three times, asking Comcast to to rehire the tech, but they have declined.

“This was a structural issue, the man should never have been on hold for over an hour,” writes Brian on Snakes on a Blog. “This was a problem to be dealt with by structural changes, not by scapegoating. If Comcast was trying to make me happy, they failed.”

While Brian’s sentiments and efforts are noble, he should get real. Comcast ineptitude aside, there’s no excuse for falling asleep on the job, especially at a customer’s house. Anything less sends a message that this behavior is tolerable.

It’s very confusing. If you want to speak with one editorial voice, you should come to some kind of consensus before posting. If you want to speak with individual voices — which I encourage you to do — then please make some distinction in the actual post. It seems more sensible that way. This has come up before, where you guys have had to post comments like, “no, that wasn’t me, that was Ben,” or whatever, and I think you’d save everyone some confusion if you just showed who wrote a given post. Thanks.

Anyway, as far as the topic at hand goes, I think you’re both right. The guy should be fired and they should make the structural changes.

Some people are never happy. The guy got bad service, it was rectified, and now he feels bad the guy lost his job. He failed at his job duty – he deserved to be fired.

If someone spits in your burger, are you going to complain once because he spit, and complain again when he gets fired? You fail at a job, you are repimanded. You severely fail – say, falling asleep at work – and you’ll bypass reprimand and head straight for fired, especially when the complainer generates enough buzz behind it to get it noticed.

He failed the “don’t do anything stupid that can be made public” test. Fire him and make an example of him. Yes, Dr. Deming would tell you the process is fucked, but sometimes we just have to throw a virgin in the volcano to appease the gods.

The editor confusion due to the “royal we” is what led me to start referring to the two as Brownpop Leeken. (In many areas of the U.S., you may prefer to say Brownsoda Leeken, or perhaps Browncoke Leeken in some parts of the south.)

When they contradict each other like this (as per ADM’s comment), I think it demands action. Let’s organize an editor fight out behind the internet to settle this. Can you throw transatlantic punches through a broadband connection? Let’s find out.

If this guy gets fired, what about the service representatives that kept him on hold for over an hour?

It’s “great” that they went after the most public face they could find, but what about all the other techs doing in-house calls that are still stuck on hold for an hour, yes staying awake, but still likely making profuse apologies to the customer that’s also sitting there wondering what the heck is going on.

This doesn’t really resolve anything, in my opinion. Nor did sending out a team of techs to the guy to fix his problem. What about the next time?

We’ll start issuing trucker-strength NoDoz to Comcast Techs now. They may be a little jittery, but they won’t snooze out on ya!

Comcast should keep the tech fired for falling asleep at the guy’s house, but they should also fire the rep that took the call to begin with. S/He obviously did not know any proper hold procedures. The rep should have at least checked back with the tech every couple of minutes.